Online Portal for Data Transfer from External Collaborators

In many projects at ZIB, data needs to be transferred from external collaborators to the institute, where the data are processed. These data are transferred via many different ways including FTP, SecureCopy, hard drives and even DVDs. After transferring the data, they are generally stored in a decentralized infrastructure at each department or research group. To store additional information (meta data) describing how the data was created, who created it and what is described by the data, text files are often stored together with the data. However, no standardized way exists to store the data and currently no common tool is available to support the acquisition of such meta data. The goal of this project is to develop a web-based tool to upload data in a standardized way including the acquisition of mandatory and optional meta data. This project together with the project on "Research Data Management at ZIB" should be seen as a joint effort to further improve the data management at ZIB.